Sustainable Startup

Principle Five: Acknowledge Mistakes And Do What It Takes

“Our greatest strength as a human race is our ability to acknowledge our differences, our greatest weakness is our failure to embrace them.”

- Judith Henderson

Failure within a startup is a fairly frequent occurrence. The important piece of that statement is not that failure happens often, rather that the opportunity to learn and grow exists more in startups than it does anywhere else. Early stage companies and startups must grasp the ideology that being right is not the objective, but learning from their failures and mistakes is.               

Acknowledging mistakes in a startup is often a practice of stepping away from your ego. Where startups are by nature small groups of people working very closely together a skewed sense of responsibility can easily develop. Team members may begin to assume credit for successes and place blame away from themselves when a project results in a failure.

Removing egos from a situation helps all those involved see not only where they can improve, but how the team can be strengthened as well.

We’ve broken Principle Five down into Two Steps:

1) Acknowledge Mistakes

2) Do What It Takes